The gScreen Spacebook dual-screen laptop

10:08 02 September 2009

The gScreen Spacebook is tipped to be the first dual screen laptop with two 15.4-inch identical screens and a full-size keyboard, built into one laptop unit, promising plenty of bang for your buck.

Developed by a small company based in Alaska, the gScreen was named after its owner and head designer, Gordon Stewart.

He targeted industry professionals from office workers to designers who need more than one monitor to keep track of their multiple applications running at the same time.

Stewart’s intention was to be provide “absolutely the opposite” of the tinier and tinier laptops and stripped-down netbooks flooding the market. The gScreen weighs around 12lb (5.5kg) which is more than twice as heavy as the average portable computer at the moment.

The combined screens add together to become 34in wide and slide out one behind the other using a unique design mechanism which then slides back should you only need the use of one screen. Costing less than £1,800, the gScreen Spacebook has created a massive buzz in the computing world.

How it will fare for the mass consumer market may be a different story, but when it goes on sale in the US in time for Christmas and in the UK three to six months later, the Spacebook could either take off or simply take up too much space.

For the techies of the world, here are the proposed specs:

• 2 LED backlit display screens
• Windows VISTA/ WIN XP PRO (optional)
• Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26-GHz
• 4 GB of RAM (2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM x 2)
• 320GB 7200-rpm HD
• NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GT with 512MB dedicated memory (or)
• NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1700M Graphics with 512MB dedicated memory
• 9-cell battery
• IEEE 1394 1 Graphics Card Output (15-pin, D-Sub) X 1, HDMI X 1 Mic-in X 1, Line-in x 1, Headphone X 1 PCI Express Card X 1 AC Power Adaptor Output: 19V DC, 90W Input: 100~240V AC, 50/60Hz universal Battery Pack Li-ion 9 cells